YAPC vs. Workshops

I had a really good time at the last YAPC::Europe, I talked to a lot of people and overall the social aspect filled much more for me this year than ealier YAPC's.

So the last few days I have been thinking a lot about the difference between a workshop and the YAPC::Europe. The YAPC::Europe seems very much a community thing, the jokes are Perl jokes, the majority of people are Perl people/community members aso.

When I look back at the two workshops we have had in Copenhagen, they (especially the second one) attempted to get this community feel to it, but did not succeed as well. The reason for this must have been the number of 'outsiders' attending the workshops, which did not know the 'Perl jokes' and just program Perl and perhaps Perl is not even their primary language.

I think the is an important lesson, it is important that the community aspect is not the focus, when having a workshop simply because the people who attend are not necessary community members.

The Perl community is important and I just read the beginning of Programming Perl again and the community is mentioned here several times, but I think it is important that the organizers of a workshop attempt to accomodate all attendees and do not just go with the flow - a workshop is not a YAPC and the focus should be different.

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I think that there always has been a large contingent of locals at the YAPC's (with Belfast being a notable exception according to Karen and Marty). We just don't notice the 20-30 locals in a crowd of 150-200 YAPC'ers. At a workshop where there is only 70-100 participants, 20 locals are really noticable.

It also requires a certain "critical mass" for in-jokes to be funny, if just 2 or 3 in the audience understand it, you won't get much of a laugh.